The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable connection-oriented transmission protocol. The TCP may provide an acknowledgement mechanism in a TCP data transmission process. Specifically, after receiving a TCP data packet, a data packet receive end may reply to a data packet transmit end with an acknowledgement (ACK), to notify the data packet transmit end that the data packet receive end already receives the TCP data packet. Certainly, the data packet receive end may acknowledge multiple TCP data packets once. For example, after sequentially receiving a TCP data packet 1, a TCP data packet 2, and a TCP data packet 3 that have consecutive sequence numbers (SN), the data packet receive end needs to acknowledge only the TCP data packet 3.
In the prior art, a TCP connection between the data packet receive end and the data packet transmit end generally includes a TCP wireless connection and a TCP wired connection. As shown in FIG. 1, a TCP connection between a terminal and an application server may include a TCP wireless connection between the terminal and a radio access network (RAN) side device and a TCP wired connection between the RAN side device and the application server via a core network.
Based on the foregoing acknowledgement mechanism, after receiving a TCP data packet sent by a data packet transmit end, both a data packet receive end in the TCP wired connection and a data packet receive end in the TCP wireless connection need to reply to the data packet transmit end with an ACK. Using the TCP wireless connection in FIG. 1 as an example, in a downlink data transmission process, after receiving a TCP data packet sent by the RAN side device, the terminal needs to reply to the RAN side device with an ACK.
However, the following problem exists: In a TCP data transmission process in a live network, a data packet receive end replies to a data packet transmit end with a relatively large quantity of ACKs (according to statistics collection, in a TCP downlink data transmission process, 90% of uplink data is ACK), and transmission of a large quantity of ACKs in a TCP wireless connection may occupy radio air interface link resources, which increases consumption of the radio air interface link resources, and affects transmission efficiency of radio service data.